Chapter 3: The Search and the Silence

Back home, Derek Foster had fallen apart. After Natalie and the boys vanished, he spent weeks roaming the town, desperate for news—sleeping in his truck, asking anyone and everyone if they’d seen his family.

Rumors ran wild—some folks whispered that Natalie had taken the boys and run off. It happened, sometimes, in those parts—families left, disappeared, and never sent word.

But Derek knew better. “Thirty dollars for a shirt,” he’d mutter. “She wouldn’t have left with just that.”

Every day, he badgered the police, hoping for a lead. Then a neighbor—old Mr. Porter—said, “Maybe you oughta look into those trafficker types.”

It wasn’t unheard of. In that corner of Ohio, kids sometimes vanished, and a few lowlifes in town had done time for trafficking.

Derek took the advice to heart. He pressed the police and launched his own search, desperate for any clue.

Soon, word of the disappearance spread. Grace Underwood, a kind neighbor, told the cops she’d seen Caleb and Noah outside a shop on Maple Heights Middle School Road. She knew Natalie—had stopped to chat, told the boys to go home early. Caleb had answered, “We’re waiting for Mom.” It seemed so normal at the time.

After that, no one saw them again.

When the police heard Grace’s story, they rushed to the shop with Derek in tow. But after a search, they found nothing—no sign of Natalie or her boys.

Derek staggered out, his world collapsing. But then he looked next door and saw the shop owned by Paul Sanford—known around town as ‘Shorty Paul,’ a man with a record and a basement deep enough to hide a body.

Derek begged the police to search Paul’s place, but with no proof, they barely looked around.

Not willing to give up, Derek scraped together eighty dollars’ worth of cigarettes and handed them out to neighbors, trying to rally a search party. But no one would join him—without evidence, they’d risk jail themselves.

Reluctantly, Derek let the trail go cold. What he didn’t know was that, at that very moment, Caleb and Noah were locked in the basement next door—so close that a shout might have saved them.

Fate, it seemed, was as cruel as it was capricious.

The father searched until he broke; the sons waited until they stopped hoping. Everything was heartbreakingly close, yet never quite enough.

After Natalie and the boys disappeared, Derek became a ghost of himself. Neighbors whispered about how he didn’t leave the house for months. His mother—gray hair thinning, hands always wringing—worried he’d hurt himself. She’d come by every morning, urging him to get some air, to eat, to hope.

But six months later, she died—grief finally claiming her. At her funeral, folks said she was clutching a photo of Caleb and Noah in her fist.

Derek lost himself for a while, wandering his empty house like a sleepwalker. He left the TV on all night, just to fill the silence, and sometimes caught himself calling out for Caleb or Noah, forgetting they were gone. In time, he managed to build a new place, desperate for a fresh start. Before he left, he scrawled a message on the back of his old bedroom door, marker ink bleeding into wood:

“Caleb, Noah, your father has gone to find you.”

That night, Derek sat in the dark, the house echoing with old laughter, old pain.

Years passed. By 2000, in Georgia, Caleb was thirteen—a fifth grader in name only, his last name lost to time. Foster or Carter, he didn’t know. He only remembered his true name, Caleb.

Home felt more like a dream every year, the faces fading. School was a blur—he sat at the bottom of the class, his heart never really in it. The only thing that made sense was art.

He filled notebook after notebook with sketches—houses, cornfields, rivers, the distant outline of the Toledo skyline, even the nightmare of his mother’s murder. Drawing was his way of keeping the past alive, the pain etched in ink and graphite.

After fifth grade, Caleb dropped out. He stayed home, working for Frank, sneaking time to fill secret diaries with words and pictures, the pages thick with longing.

Christmas of 2000, thirteen-year-old Caleb noticed neighbors coming back from up north with fancy wood carvings and extra cash. Curious, he asked around. Wood carving was the new trade—good money if you could learn.

A spark of hope flickered. He went to Frank, asking to apprentice as a carver. Of course, it cost money—tuition Frank didn’t want to spend on him.

But Caleb was ready for that. He explained, careful and polite, that a skilled wood carver could send home more money than any chore boy. He promised Frank a big cut.

The thought of steady cash swayed Frank. He agreed, grumbling about how much trouble it was.

The next morning, Caleb packed his few things—sketchbook, pencils, a change of clothes—and caught the Greyhound to North Carolina. As the bus rumbled away, he felt a strange freedom, the weight of Frank’s house finally off his shoulders.

He never intended to look back.